Rubicon: Porting to Windows RT only made us £52
"If other developers get this treatment, that store is going to look mighty bleak for a long time to come"
Paul Johnson, of UK developer Rubicon, has slammed the Windows RT marketplace after a port of his well received game Great Big War Game made just £52 from the platform in its first week on sale.
Johnson estimates the port to have cost the company somewhere in the region of £10,000.
Writing in a blog post on the developer's site, Johnson expressed extreme frustration at the lack of support he felt he received from Microsoft, making it clear that not only does he recommend other devs steer clear of RT, but that Rubicon will never be producing a game for a Microsoft platform again.
"A week after release we have made the princely sum of £52 in sales," he writes. "That's not a typo. And despite this, and the fact that GBWG is one of only several halfway decent launch titles, Microsoft have confirmed they will not give us any promotional features or help us with visibility in any way.
"If you're familiar with their new store, this means our app is forever consigned to the garbage bin, presumably earning us less than £52 a week in future. Even if that rate is sustained, it will take just under two years before we recoup the salary paid to the guy who did the port."
"We have wasted a lot of time, resources and money on supporting this platform and all that happened was we got spat on."
Paul Johnson, Rubicon.
Microsoft, feels Johnson, are putting out titles on the tablet OS to die, failing to offer any merchandising support and leaving developers feeling massively under appreciated.
"Apple regularly promote our apps," he continues. "Android regularly promote our apps. Even RIM (Blackberry) regularly promote our apps. We enjoy working with those companies and it's nice to see them acknowledge that we bring them some small amount of additional value to their setup. Firms our size need a bit of a leg up, and we go out of our way to show our gratitude to the above for helping us out in this way from time to time.
"Microsoft on the other hand clearly do not value us at all. Even whilst there's almost nothing to promote, they will not feature our title for bizarre admin reasons. And this is whilst their store is empty and they need developers like us to fill their store far more than developers like us need them to pay us £50 a week."